Harsha Madhyastha selected for Google Faculty Award

Prof. Harsha V. Madhyastha has been awarded a 2017 Google Faculty Research Award for his work in enabling the deployment of low-latency web services in the cloud.

To minimize user-perceived latencies, web services need to be deployed across a geographically distributed set of data centers, and using the cloud offers a cost-effective way to do so. However, a geo-distributed web service must dynamically adapt client to data center redirection mappings in response to changes in Internet path latencies, and doing so is hard for web services deployed in the cloud.

In this project, Prof. Madhyastha seeks to enable the cloud provider to monitor traffic on behalf of all the web services hosted on its platform, rather than requiring every web service to independently monitor the Internet paths to its clients as is typically done. Placing the onus for monitoring Internet paths on the cloud provider can enable timely changes to client redirection in response to changes in path performance, because the cloud provider has visibility into the aggregate traffic across all web services it hosts. The goals of this project are to minimize the overheads associated with monitoring all Internet traffic coming in and going out of every data center and to maximize the timeliness of dynamically adapting client to data center mappings.

Prof. Madhyastha has previously been a recipient of the Google Faculty Research Award in 2013 and 2016, both for his work on enabling faster web page loads on smartphones.

Prof. Madhyastha received his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington in 2008. He joined the faculty at Michigan in 2014 from University of California, Riverside, where he was Assistant Professor.

Prof. Madhyastha’s research spans the areas of distributed systems, networking, and security and privacy. Most of his work focuses on simplifying the development of and enabling the cost-effective deployment of performant, highly available, and privacy-preserving Internet-scale software services. His research has received support from the Army Research Office (ARO), the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) agency, Amazon, VMware, multiple Google Faculty Research awards, a NetApp Faculty Fellowship, and an NSF CAREER award. His work has also resulted in award papers at the USENIX NSDI, ACM SIGCOMM IMC, and IEEE CNS conferences.